East Africa

East Africa

Details: East Africa; 02 November 2021; 809

Area residents who live at the foothills of the snow-capped Mount Kilimanjaro have seen it in transition during their lifetimes. (Andrew Wasike / AA)

While scientists warn that the three ice-capped mountains in Africa may soon be left without snow, the melting glaciers of Tanzania’s Mount Kilimanjaro have borne wetlands and lakes in Kenya.

The layer of snow covering the summit of Tanzania’s Mount Kilimanjaro is rapidly disappearing because of the climate crisis.

Area residents who live at the foothills of the snow-capped mountain have seen it in transition during their lifetimes.

“Every morning as a child when I took the cows out to graze, I could see the snow, the mountain was so clear back then. There was snow everywhere covering not only the top part of the mountain like it does today, but stretching close to the mid-section,” 72-year old Stephen Koitalel reminisces.

“It was a beautiful sight for everyone and people used to pray and hold initiation ceremonies such as circumcision and weddings while facing the mountain. Nowadays, the snow is thin, barely visible, it used to be a huge chunk of white snow. I don’t know what happened to the snow but it just disappeared.”

Lekumok Lakamai, a 53-year-old nomadic herder from the Entonet area of Kajiado County, echoes those sentiments. “When growing up, my parents used to tell me that there was so much snow on the mountain, even our grandparents told us folk stories based on the mountains passed down from generation to generation. We can’t tell our kids such stories today because there is no snow to talk about,” he says.

Indeed, the dormant volcano has been losing snow from its peaks at a steady pace. A 2013 article published by the European Geosciences Union notes that “The glaciers have retreated from their former extent of 11.40 km2 in 1912 to 1.76 km2 in 2011, which represents a total loss of about 85% of the ice cover over the last 100 [years].”

Another article, from 2009, published by Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), documents the ice cover loss: “Summit ice cover (areal extent) decreased ≈1% per year from 1912 to 1953 and ≈2.5% per year from 1989 to 2007. Of the ice cover present in 1912, 85% has disappeared and 26% of that present in 2000 is now gone.”

The authors of the PNAS article note that “The three remaining ice fields on the plateau and the slopes are both shrinking laterally and rapidly thinning,” and warn that “If current climatological conditions are sustained, the ice fields atop Kilimanjaro and on its flanks will likely disappear within several decades.”

The UN has warned that rising temperatures are leading to the disappearance of glaciers found on only three mountains in Africa –– Mount Kilimanjaro, Mount Kenya and the Rwenzori Mountains –– which are expected to melt entirely in the near future.

In the State of the Climate in Africa 2020 report published by World Meteorological Organization last month, scientists suggest that “If current retreat rates prevail, the African mountains will be deglaciated by the 2040s,” adding that “Mount Kenya is likely to be deglaciated a decade sooner, which will make it one of the first entire mountain ranges to lose glaciers due to anthropogenic climate change.”

Despite a severe drought in the part of Kenya that houses the Amboseli National Park, park life is thriving with water and swampy grasslands everywhere. (Andrew Wasike / AA)

Melting snow forms wetlands, attracting flamingos

Dr. Patrick Omondi, chief executive officer of Wildlife Research and Training Institute in Kenya says the melting snow has turned a large area of the 151 square miles (392 square kilometers) Amboseli National Park into a wetland.

He adds that the melting of the Kilimanjaro glacier has had positive and negative effects. On the Kenyan side, the results have been positive.

“It is positive because Amboseli was not originally a wetland area. The melting glaciers now have filtered through and created swamps. Amboseli has now become a new bird paradise, we have birds like flamingos, which we used not to have here before and we are actually thinking of naming Amboseli as one of the international wetlands of importance,” comments the top Kenyan researcher.

The drastic climatic change has brought the pink-feathered birds that stand on impossibly thin legs to Amboseli where there is abundant food in swamps. According to scientists, snow forms on Kilimanjaro and immediately melts because of the warm temperature. The cycle forms an uninterrupted supply of underground water that flows down the mountain to the park.

“These swamps serve the local communities occasionally, when they come to give water to their animals when the drought is high, and like now, when the drought is here, this is a permanent water source, so it has helped,” says Omondi.

Despite a severe drought in that part of Kenya, park life is thriving with water and swampy grasslands everywhere. Elephants can be seen wallowing in the mud and other animals like zebras and wildebeests feeding on pasture.

The melting Kilimanjaro has positive effects on the Kenyan side but devastating effects in Tanzania.

In Loitokitok, on the Kenyan side, residents complain of low water levels.

“The melting of the mountain on the other side is not very good. There are high temperatures that come with droughts meaning animals disperse wide and far and it escalates human-wildlife conflict,” explains Omondi.

Paleo-climatologists have warned that melting glaciers will lead to fewer water resources for communities living around the mountain, especially on the Tanzanian side. Streams and rivers originating from the mountain have either dried up or have lower volumes of water.

The WMO report notes that this is to be expected, yet adds that the glaciers are significant for other reasons: “Although these glaciers [the Mount Kenya massif (Kenya), the Rwenzori Mountains (Uganda) and Mount Kilimanjaro (United Republic of Tanzania)] are too small to act as significant water reservoirs, they are of eminent touristic and scientific importance.”

Kenya Wildlife Service Director-General John Waweru says that two lakes have formed in Amboseli due to global warming.

“The water that is in the Amboseli system is water that actually comes from Mount Kilimanjaro through underground rivers. We have noticed that there are two lakes that are now forming which have not been named yet, but of course, there is a plan to name them in the near future,” he says. Source: TRTWorld and agencies

Details: East Africa; 02 November 2021; 905

As Kenya approaches the highly charged 2022 elections, peacebuilders face a growing challenge on how to make peacebuilding known, accessible, and actionable in an objective and informative manner through scientific inquiry or research. As election activities heat up, we are witnessing increased ethnic polarization veiled as political persuasion with economic undertones and fear of conflict. The latter is characterized by a political discourse of class struggle between hustlers (the proletariat/peasants) and dynasties (the ruling class). It is often very clear on social media spaces how ethnic political and class polarization is playing out in real-time on the ground.

Polarization and potential conflict have prompted a number of civil society organizations, including The Peacemaker Corps Foundation Kenya, +Peace Coalition, The National Crime Research Center, The Center for Media, Democracy, Peace and Security-Rongo University, Maskani Commons, and BuildUp, to create an online and offline peacebuilding narrative change campaign to address these fears from both a media-centric perspective and a cultural strategy perspective. The former implies the use of new media technologies—especially social media platforms—for peacebuilding. The latter involves the use of music, art, and culture (language) as central aspects of peacebuilding.

The media’s representation of ideas including peace and security involves privileged access to the symbolic cultural artefacts that are used as the language of constructing meaning.

This includes access to media technologies and cultural capital, a domain dominated by the elite. This is why representation is central in constructing material experiences or reality and should not be taken for granted. The media is at the core (public sphere) of shaping this reality.

Contextual Scope

Elections in Kenya are usually controversial and violent and have led to the loss of lives and property. The deadliest electoral violence occurred in 2007-2008, when hundreds died, thousands were displaced, and property worth hundreds of millions was destroyed. Investors shunned the country as a result, and the outcome subsequently affected tourism and agriculture, mainstays of the Kenyan economy.

Notably, post-election violence in Kenya historically erupts from the opposition stronghold of Kisumu City in a township called Kondele where multi-ethnic youth face high levels of poverty and unemployment. This demographic is therefore weaponized every electoral cycle by political elites as a negative ethnicity in their quest for political power.

The 2017 elections were a replay of the 2007 elections, not by magnitude of violence, but by the manner in which those elections contested the Supreme Court of Kenya (SCOK), which ruled that they were neither free nor fair. Subsequently, the SCOK rejected those elections and declared them null and void, triggering panic and awakening ethnic insecurity and violence and setting the stage for Kenya’s uncertain future.

Concurrently, a compromise between the two electoral contenders and "ethnic" historical rivals/leaders from the Kikuyu and Luo community emerged. Public discourse argues that when the Mountain (Mount Kenya) meets the Lake (Lake Victoria or Nam Lolwe in Dho Luo) Kenya often progresses peacefully. In this spirit of “the mountain meeting the lake,” the incumbent, Uhuru Kenyatta, and the leading opposition, Raila Odinga, put their differences aside and shook hands outside Harambee House (or Pulling Together House) in a public display under the media’s glare as a sign of peace. This action, famously known as "The Handshake", was later anchored into law as the Building Bridges to a better Kenya Initiative (BBI), as deliberated and approved by about 45 County Assemblies or devolved units of government.

However, BBI faces challenges, including legal hurdles, which led to its nullification at the High Court of Kenya. The case was declared null and void by the court of appeal and is currently awaiting the Supreme Court's decision in order to be implemented. Like the nullified 2017 controversial elections, BBI's nullification has further set the stage for political extremism as uncertainty looms over its fate.

Peace Building Campaign

Politicians often refer to Canaan for selfish interests to gain political favor rather than as a genuine attempt to make a spiritual/theological reference. Consequently, this ideal of Canaan would translate to the land of plenty (economic liberation). In that process, they have politicized and ethnicized theological connotations of Canaan. They also smeared its symbolic cultural meaning, leaving peacebuilders with limited and distorted lexicons—a reality that must be rejected at all costs by reclaiming the authentic biblical reference of Canaan as opposed to political in all forms of representation.

Reclaiming Canaan

The Karibu Kanaan or Welcome to Kanaan Music and Art Festival for Peace is an attempt to take up space for peace, subverted as Kanaan to be more realistic and less idealistic, where Kenyans embrace Ubuntu or humanity, Umoja or unity and Harambee or collective responsibility. It is therefore a collective pan-African attempt to take the potentially divisive idea of Canaan in national political discourse and creatively and constructively use it through music, art, and cultural activities as a peacebuilding strategy.

The festival that happened on October 2, 2021, created awareness about the value of peace. It also utilized creative outlets to educate on what is at stake if Kenya was to return to electoral violence, what Kenyans are bound to lose, how they can pull together, and what they can do to stop electoral violence in order to imagine what a peaceful and prosperous country would look like (Kanaan or Canaan).

The festival’s design acted as a laboratory context for peacebuilding research. Truth Wire conducted a survey that targeted festival participants, and Peace Design Lab measured sentiments of Kisumu residents around the upcoming elections for conflict mapping through scenario building. The analysis concluded that on one side, ethnicity and pride remain some of the biggest peacebuilding challenges; however, on the other side, love and unity emerge as the greatest desires.

These findings acted as our baseline and would be later probed by the Center for Media, Democracy, Peace and Security– Rongo University, PeaceTech Lab, and the Peacemaker Corps Foundation Kenya in a national offline survey to corroborate the baseline data. The data is also used by The Peacemaker Corps Foundation Kenya, +Peace Coalition, National Crime Research Center, BuildUp, Maskani Commons, The Center for Media, Democracy, Peace and Security-Rongo University, Kuchora Tu Studios (artists), and Kisumu County/City as the basis for our 16-month campaign for peaceful elections in 2022. The campaign utilizes hashtags to monitor peacebuilding posts online. Wilson Center

Details: East Africa; 02 November 2021; 768

Authorities in Uganda said Monday that a suicide bomber who triggered an explosion on a bus last week had been trained with many other young people by members of the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF) rebel group.

ADF rebels are Ugandan terrorists based in the jungles of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) from where they attack villages in the DRC and also send terrorists to Uganda to carry out attacks.

The suicide attack on Oct. 25 targeting the bus left one person dead and several wounded. The bus was traveling from Uganda’s capital Kampala to the town of Bushenyi, about 300 kilometers (186 miles) west of the capital.

Ugandan police spokesman Fred Enanga while addressing journalists in Kampala said the suicide bomber had been identified as Isaac Matovu and had been trained by the ADF.

“According to our investigations, Matovu was trained as a suicide bomber by the ADF with many other youths. They were indoctrinated by the ADF rebels into carrying out suicide attacks. We believe there could be other suicide bombers still at large. The public should be vigilant towards people with weird behavior like putting on heavy jackets during hot days and those who look nervous especially in the midst of security personnel, among other characteristics,” Enanga said.

According to police, ADF rebels are responsible for two explosions that have recently rocked the country. On Oct. 23, a bomb exploded in a restaurant on the outskirts of Kampala, killing one person and leaving several others wounded.

They added that they have arrested 48 suspects believed to have a connection to the attacks. - Godfrey Olukya, Anadolu Agency

Details: East Africa; 02 November 2021; 811

KAMPALA, Uganda

ADF rebels are Ugandan terrorists based in the jungles of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) from where they attack villages in the DRC and also send terrorists to Uganda to carry out attacks.

The suicide attack on Oct. 25 targeting the bus left one person dead and several wounded. The bus was travelling from Uganda’s capital Kampala to the town of Bushenyi, about 300 kilometers (186 miles) west of the capital.

Ugandan police spokesman Fred Enanga while addressing journalists in Kampala said the suicide bomber had been identified as Isaac Matovu and had been trained by the ADF.

“According to our investigations, Matovu was trained as a suicide bomber by the ADF with many other youths. They were indoctrinated by the ADF rebels into carrying out suicide attacks. We believe there could be other suicide bombers still at large. The public should be vigilant towards people with weird behaviour like putting on heavy jackets during hot days and those who look nervous especially in the midst of security personnel, among other characteristics,” Enanga said.

They added that they have arrested 48 suspects believed to have a connection to the attacks. By Godfrey Olukya, Anadolu Agency

Details: East Africa; 01 November 2021; 827

Participants during the ATI workshop A19 held together with the Commission on Administration of Justice and Country Assemblies Forum

Five years after the enactment of the Access to Information Act, Kenya still struggles with the implementation of this legislation.

Enacted on 21 September 2016, the Access to Information Act gave life to Article 35 of the Constitution of Kenya 2010; which guarantees every Kenyan the right to seek access and obtain information from public bodies and private bodies acting in a public nature. This right is also anchored in global and regional instruments ratified by Kenya, such as Article 19 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and Article 9 of the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights. The latter is further elaborated through the Declaration of Principles on Freedom of Expression and Access to Information in Africa.

In addition, in 2018, President Uhuru Kenyatta issued an Executive Order directing all public institutions to fully disclose and publish public procurement information and manage them through a centralized electronic platform. This order strengthened the right of access to information in the country. Makueni was the first county to set up open an open contracting portal using open data and detailed disclosure of public information about each of the procurement processes. Elgeyo Marakwet county followed suit in April 2021.

The Progress on Access to Information

Advocacy on access to information in Kenya has always been a multi-stakeholder effort with civil society being at the forefront. After the enactment of the ATI Act, the focus shifted to its implementation. This included supporting duty bearers to understand their role and mandate as provided by law, creating awareness amongst rights holders and supporting the Commission on Administrative Justice (CAJ) to effectively fulfil their mandate.

Civil society has partnered with the CAJ to undertake numerous awareness and sensitisation training forums for public officers, particularly within the counties, on their roles in the implementation of the ATI Act. The Commission together with the Kenya School of Government, the Local Development Research Institute (LDRI) and ARTICLE 19 worked together to develop an access-to-information curriculum that targeted key implementers of access to information, including chief executive officers, information-access officers, mid-and top-level directors, heads of human resources, and complaints handling committees.

Access to information at the county level has been a work in progress with counties like Elgeyo Marakwet, Makueni, Nandi and Isiolo being exemplary. For instance, last year Elgeyo Marakwet was the only county to publish all seven of its budget documents as required by Kenya’s Public Finance Management Act of 2012. Additionally, the CAJ developed a model law on Access to Information for county governments and so far counties five counties – Embu, Kisumu, Bomet, Kwale and Kiambu – have passed the County ATI Law.

Despite these initiatives to enhance transparency and fulfil the right to information, execution has been slow and allegations of opaqueness stemming from a culture of secrecy remain widespread. For instance, despite multiple information requests, the government has continuously failed to disclose information relating to the KES 450 billion Standard Gauge Railway (SGR) contract. On 21 June 2021, a petition was filed at the High Court of Mombasa on behalf of The Institute for Social Accountability (TISA) and Okoa Mombasa, demanding the disclosure of SGR contracts and seeking to obtain agreements and studies related to the construction and operation of the Standard Gauge Railway (SGR).

In addition, in the context of the pandemic, various State and public entities have failed to provide timely and accurate information relating to COVID-19 response and management. The Kenya Legal & Ethical Issues Network on HIV and AIDS (KELIN), Katiba Institute, Transparency International Kenya and ten others filed a petition at the Constitutional and Human Rights Division of the High Court, asking the government to provide data supporting the enactment of the Covid-19 regulations including mandatory quarantine and support that had been provided to health workers.

Protection for whistleblowers is also a fundamental principle of Access to Information. Individuals who release information on wrongdoing – whistleblowers – must be protected from any legal, administrative, employment-related sanctions, reputational and physical harm. Unfortunately, Kenya has a history of failing to protect whistleblowers. This is evident by the outcome of the cases of David Munyakei in the Goldenberg scandal, John Githongo in the Anglo-Leasing scandal, Spencer Sankale in the Mara Heist, Ali Gire the Kenya Airways employee who blew the whistle on the China Southern flight debacle and most recently the grisly murder of Ms Jennifer Wambua, who was working at the National Land Commission and was reportedly a key state witness in a corruption case. The lack of overarching comprehensive legislation to protect whistleblowers in Kenya has not only left them vulnerable to retaliation but has also exacerbated the culture of silence and secrecy, allowing corruption and abuse of office to thrive.

Why Regulations Matter

The full realisation of the right of access to information depends upon the issuance of regulations by the Cabinet Secretary of ICT, Innovation and Youth Affairs as required under Section 25 of the Act. Without these regulations in place, there is a lack of clarity concerning how information can and should be requested, the format in which the responsible authorities should provide information, as well as remedies in the event of non-compliance, among other things.

Since 2018, there has been an ongoing initiative to develop the Access to Information Regulations through a collaborative effort between the CAJ, the Ministry of ICT, the National Law Reform Commission (NLRC), and ARTICLE 19 as a representative of the civil society. In June 2021, the Commission on Administrative Justice published the regulations and is still seeking comments from the general public as part of the public participation process.

In advocating for the enactment of the regulations, there is a need to acknowledge that effective realisation of the right to information goes beyond the passage of the law. There is a need to accentuate its importance as a driver of accountability, transparency and good governance and in the realization of the Agenda 2030 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), and Vision 2030. While a lot of emphases has been placed on capacity building and awareness creation for public officials, citizens remain unaware of their rights of access to information. Much more still needs to be done. By Sarah Wasonga, Article 19

Climate crisis begets natural beauty in Africa

Area residents who live at the foothills of the snow-capped Mount Kilimanjaro have seen it in transition during their lifetimes. (Andrew Wasike / AA)

While scientists warn that the three ice-capped mountains in Africa may soon be left without snow, the melting glaciers of Tanzania’s Mount Kilimanjaro have borne wetlands and lakes in Kenya.

Peacebuilding and the Political Economy of Representation in Kenya’s 2022 Elections

Contextual Scope

Peace Building Campaign

Reclaiming Canaan

Uganda says many youth trained to be suicide bombers

Uganda says many youth trained to be suicide bombers

KAMPALA, Uganda

Kenya: Hasten Efforts to Enact the Access to Information Regulations

The Progress on Access to Information

Why Regulations Matter

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